The texts in this list are curated through my personal interest and recommendations from publishing companies, authors, and publicists. Please contact me with upcoming releases. Understand that I will only include two texts per publishing company. Amazon and Bookshop are affiliated links and qualifying sales help to sustain Entropy. I can be reached at jacob@entropymag.org.
BlazeVOX Books
Ante-Animots: Idioms and Tales by Nicholas Alexander Hayes
82 pages – BlazeVox
“These idioms and tales use language as a tool to lift a hazy film away from our perception and replace it with another. Is it surgery or a theater of cruelty, a catastrophe or a joke? It’s an intervention into both the real and the imaginary—not to show us that one lies beneath the other or hidden inside like a nested doll, but to remind us that animals are composed of wounds and words and that all of us are dying. It isn’t pretty, and it is. It isn’t imaginary, and none of it is real. It’s a vicious and lyrical, lucid and fantastical, vast little book.”– Stephen Beachy
Burnside Review
Fur Not Light by Jeff Alessandrelli
62 pages – Burnside Review
“The titles in Jeff Alessandrelli’s Fur Not Light—‘Be Yer Own Hitman,’ say, or ‘Nothing of the Month Club’—are grimly funny indicators of what’s to come. These are poems about how to downsize hope, that most human of emotions. ‘We hope to resign ourselves to hope,’ Alessandrelli writes, but, of course, we never quite succeed. Hope and resignation tussle endlessly here like a Buddhist version of Laurel and Hardy. In Fur Not Light wisdom has rhythm.” -Rae Armantrout
C&R Press
No Good Very Bad Asian by Leland Cheuk
250 pages – C&R Press /Amazon
“Meet Sirius Lee, a fictive famous Chinese American comedian. He’s a no good, very bad Asian. He’s not good at math (or any other subject, really). He has no interest in finding a ‘good Chinese girlfriend.’ And he refuses to put any effort into becoming the CEO/Lawyer/Doctor his parents so desperately want him to be. All he wants to do is making people laugh. A cross between Paul Beatty’s The Selloutand Jade Chang’s The Wangs Vs. The World, NO GOOD VERY BAD ASIANfollows Sirius from his poor upbringing in the immigrant enclaves of Los Angeles to the loftiest heights of stardom as he struggles with substance abuse and persistent racism despite his fame. Ultimately, when he becomes a father himself, he must come to terms with who he is, where he came from, and the legacy he’ll leave behind.” -from the C&R Press website
Cardboard House Press
Room in Rome by Jorge Eduardo Eielson (trans. David Shook)
108 pages – Cardboard House Press/ Amazon
“As a person, Eielson always kept something secret, an intimacy he preserved even beyond the reach of his closest friends. This mysterious depth intrigued and fascinated those who knew him and is a salient feature of his writing, sculpture, and paintings. Perhaps this depth will help ensure that his visual and poetic works endure. Though inseparable from the period in which it was created, Eielson’s work deserves to live on and bear witness for future generations to the myths, dreams, miseries, and achievements pertaining to the world in which Eielson both suffered and enjoyed his life.”—Mario Vargas Llosa
Chax Press
Io’s Song by Murat Nemet-Nejat
132 pages – Small Press Distribution
“Io’s Song is poem, energy field, myth, and autobiographical essay. It is “signatures’ colors.” As the author states near the end of the work, Myth is not a narrative applied, but dis-covered. The narrative that emanates against our will revealing ITSELF, A VIOLENT LIGHT that descends and leaves. Every myth is an arrival and escape, departure which in truth is death. This is due to the nature of words, their will to metamorphoze themselves from meaning to meaning, AS BEEING, crossing boundaries across human will, human reason or human culture, seeing ourselves thru the mirror of language as a reflection, willess, bobbing on the alien surface (facade) of words, ceding to insanity to plumb its depths.” -from the Small Press Distribution website
The Long White Cloud of Unknowing by Lisa Samuels
118 pages – Small Press Distribution
“How can we come to know—to truly experience—place, presence, and time’s own embodiment in us: what earlier writers have called ‘the divine?’ In the quiet power of Lisa Samuels’s vocalized listening across languages and via bodies, we too are a listening body, a body in absorption and expulsion, attentive in the thinking, pause, and query of a day in a woman’s life. Spanish French Māori Latin all course thru the mind of the one thinking in English, whose rich linguistic inner life we inhabit and move in as if it were a spacesuit we don to float in atmospheres otherwise inaccessible to us. In this language, this unknowing cloud full of knowledges, relations, worldly resonances, we are held. The Long White Cloud of Unknowing captivates utterly.”—Erín Moure
Cleveland State University Poetry Center
Scorpionic Sun by Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine (trans. Conor Bracken)
124 pages – Cleveland State University Poetry Center
“No, decolonizing is not a metaphor, but it is a proposal emerging from the place where land and consciousness meet. To get closer to that place Khaïr-Eddine’s Scorpionic Sun resists any nation state—or any reader—who would take up land or consciousness, song or bodies as mere instruments. Wisely, then, Conor Bracken’s translation doesn’t so much use as it delivers English into the brutal ongoingness of what Teresa Villa-Ignacio has called Khaïr-Eddine’s ‘seismic line.’ Thus thoroughly shaken and gone we can find one another ‘by a necessary association with events to come.'”—Farid Matuk
World’d Too Much: The Selected Poetry of Russell Atkins – (ed. Kevin Prufer and Robert E. McDonough)
248 pages – Cleveland State University Poetry Center
“Russell Atkins is a poet, playwright, composer, and editor from Cleveland. In 2017 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Cleveland Arts Prize at age 91. In 1950 he co-founded Free Lance, the Black avant-garde publishing house and literary journal, where his essay on the theory of psychovisualism first appeared. Atkins’s only full-length collection of poetry, Here In The, was published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 1975 and his chapbooks include A Podium Presentation (1960), Phenomena (1961), Objects (1963), Objects 2 (1964), Heretofore (1968), The Nail, to Be Set to Music (1970), Maleficium (1971), and Whichever (1978). He also wrote verse-plays including The Abortionist and The Corpse. Two previous books explore Atkins’s legacy—Russell Atkins: On the Life & Work of an American Master (2013), edited by Kevin Prufer and Michael Dumanis, and In the Company of Russell Atkins (2016), edited by Diane Kendig and Robert E. McDonough—and the CSU Poetry Center is honored to once again contribute to his oeuvre with World’d Too Much, a comprehensive collection of Atkins’s work including 100+ poems, two poetry dramas, a manifesto, and a foreword by Janice A. Lowe. Readers can find more from and about Atkins at A Public Space, Belt Magazine, Jacket2, the Poetry Foundation, the Cleveland Arts Prize, and in a forthcoming feature issue of Callaloo.” –from the Cleveland State University Poetry Center
Dzanc Books
Bloomland by John Englehardt
200 pages – Dzanc Books / Amazon
WINNER OF THE 2018 DZANC PRIZE FOR FICTION
“Bloomland opens during finals week at a fictional southern university, when a student walks into the library with his roommate’s semi-automatic rifle and opens fire. When he stops shooting, twelve people are dead. In this richly textured debut, John Englehardt explores how the origin and aftermath of the shooting impacts the lives of three characters: a disillusioned student, a grieving professor, and a young man whose valuation of fear and disconnection funnels him into the role of the aggressor. As the community wrestles with the fallout, Bloomland interrogates social and cultural dysfunction in a nation where mass violence has become all too familiar. Profound and deeply nuanced, Bloomland is a dazzling debut that walks in step with We Need to Talk About Kevin and the novels of Denis Johnson, Rachel Kushner, and Tom McAllister.” – from the Dzanc Books website
Eulalia Books
Echo of the Park by Romina Freschi
108 pages – Eulalia Books /Amazon
“Romina Freschi’s Echo of the Park is a philosophical long poem that surveys made spaces, both elevated and debased. In dialogue with First Dream by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Freschi captures fleeting states of grace, such as “ecstasy” and “bliss,” and the ensuing gravitational pull of urban life’s “imperfect terrain.” All urban spaces are interior and exterior, private and public, confining and freeing. Ultimately the park, and the “parkified” speech of the poem, are sites of mourning. Can a former site of political violence be converted into a public green space? Jeannine Marie Pitas’s nuanced translation presents Romina Freschi as one of the most singular and startling voices in contemporary Argentine poetry.” -from the Small Press Distribution website
Graywolf Press
Machine by Susan Steinberg
160 pages – Graywolf Books/ Amazon
“Susan Steinberg’s first novel, Machine, is a dazzling and innovative leap forward for a writer whose most recent book, Spectacle, gained her a rapturous following. Machine revolves around a group of teenagers—both locals and wealthy out-of-towners—during a single summer at the shore. Steinberg captures the pressures and demands of this world in a voice that effortlessly slides from collective to singular, as one girl recounts a night on which another girl drowned. Hoping to assuage her guilt and evade a similar fate, she pieces together the details of this tragedy, as well as the breakdown of her own family, and learns that no one, not even she, is blameless. A daring stylist, Steinberg contrasts semicolon-studded sentences with short lines that race down the page. This restless approach gains focus and power through a sharply drawn narrative that ferociously interrogates gender, class, privilege, and the disintegration of identity in the shadow of trauma. Machine is the kind of novel—relentless and bold—that only Susan Steinberg could have written.” -from the Graywof Press website
(Please note: For complete transparency–Jacob Singer, the editor of this list, studied with Susan Steinberg. Neither she nor Graywolf contacted him for inclusion on the list.)
Humorist Books
From the Campaign Trail or Thereabouts by Michael Bleicher and Andy Newton
318 pages – Humorist Books
“From the Campaign Trail or Thereabouts is the story of two insulated Upper West Side journalists, Harold Carlyle, a self-serving, incompetent reporter desperate to save both his career and marriage, and his wife, Pattie, an observant, sharp-tongued, and successful television critic. When Harold is assigned to cover the 2016 Presidential Election, he devises a scheme to save his marriage by taking Pattie with him across the country. From the Campaign Trail or Thereabouts dives into the contradictory, divided, and all-too-often unsettling state of the union. Like Huck Finn meets Game Change, the novel examines the politicians and popular figures who played starring roles in 2016 and holds up a mirror to the electorate that ultimately made Trumpism possible.” – from the Humorist Books website
PM Press
Silenced by Sound: The Music Meritocracy Myth by Ian Brennan
256 pages – PM Books/ Amazon
“Popular culture has woven itself into the social fabric of our lives, penetrating people’s homes and haunting their psyches through images and earworm hooks. Justice, at most levels, is something the average citizen may have little influence upon, leaving us feeling helpless and complacent. But pop music is a neglected arena where concrete change can occur—by exercising active and thoughtful choices to reject the low-hanging, omnipresent corporate fruit, we begin to rebalance the world, one engaged listener at a time. Silenced by Sound: The Music Meritocracy Myth is a powerful exploration of the challenges facing art, music, and media in the digital era. With his fifth book, producer, activist, and author Ian Brennan delves deep into his personal story to address the inequity of distribution in the arts globally. Brennan challenges music industry tycoons by skillfully demonstrating that there are millions of talented people around the world far more gifted than the superstars for whom billions of dollars are spent to promote the delusion that they have been blessed with unique genius. We are invited to accompany the author on his travels, finding and recording music from some of the world’s most marginalized peoples. In the breathtaking range of this book, our preconceived notions of art are challenged by musicians from South Sudan to Kosovo, as Brennan lucidly details his experiences recording music by the Tanzania Albinism Collective, the Zomba Prison Project, a “witch camp” in Ghana, the Vietnamese war veterans of Hanoi Masters, the Malawi Mouse Boys, the Canary Island whistlers, genocide survivors in both Cambodia and Rwanda, and more. Silenced by Sound is defined by muscular, terse, and poetic verse, and a nonlinear format rife with how-to tips and anecdotes. The narrative is driven and made corporeal via the author’s ongoing field-recording chronicles, his memoir-like reveries, and the striking photographs that accompany these projects. After reading it, you’ll never hear quite the same again.” -from the PM Press website
Split Lip Press
Tracing the Desire Line: A Memoir in Essays by Mellisa Matthewson
232 pages – Split Lip Press
“A gripping and lyrical look at marriage, motherhood, and desire. This memoir-in-essays unearths Matthewson’s stirrings, endeavors, and adventures beyond wife and mother to reveal the woman she hopes to be: free. Matthewson’s prose pulls like the current of an easy river, and the yearnings she reveals burn like whiskey at dusk. With echoes of Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay” and Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” Matthewson presents a woman, a writer, a mother, and a lover unafraid to chase the storm. For anyone whose wanting has always been too much, this is the book for you.”
-Jill Talbot
Twisted Road Publications
Dreaming the Marsh by Elizabeth McCulloch
224 pages – Small Press Distributions
“Mother Nature has had enough and a day of reckoning is coming, foretold by words that mysteriously appear on the side of a shiny new building. When the reckoning arrives, in the form of a giant sinkhole that swallows the site of a planned development, a large lake, and several miles of interstate highway, the citizens of Opakulla, Florida struggle to understand what is happening. A geologist wants to study it, the developers relish its wild beauty, and the mayor plans to stop it. Only the owner of a local cafe, who speaks with the Ancients, understands it, and she isn’t telling.” -from the Small Press Distribution website
Two Dollar Radio
Savage Gods by Paul Kingsnorth
142 pages – Two Dollar Radio/ Amazon
“After moving with his wife and two children to a smallholding in Ireland, Paul Kingsnorth expects to find contentment. It is the goal he has sought — to nest, to find home — after years of rootlessness as an environmental activist and author. Instead he finds that his tools as a writer are failing him, calling into question his foundational beliefs about language and setting him at odds with culture itself. Informed by his experiences with indigenous peoples, the writings of D.H. Lawrence and Annie Dillard, and the day-to-day travails of farming his own land, Savage Gods asks: what does it mean to belong? What sacrifices must be made in order to truly inhabit a life? And can words ever paint the truth of the world — or are they part of the great lie which is killing it?” –from the Two Dollar Radio website
Two Lines Press
This Tilting World by Colette Fellous (Trans. Sophie Lewis)
168 pages – Two Lines Press/ Amazon
“On the night following the terrorist attack that killed thirty-eight tourists on the beach at Sousse, a woman sits facing the sea and writes a love letter to her homeland, Tunisia, which she feels she must now leave forever. Personal tragedies soon resurface—the deaths of her father, a quiet man who had left all he held dear in Tunisia to emigrate to France, and of another lifelong friend, a writer who just weeks ago died at sea, having forsaken the writing that had given his life meaning.
From Tunisia to Paris to a Flaubertian village in Normandy, and with nods to Proust and Barthes, Fellous’s complex and loving story offers a multitude of colorful portraits, and sweeps readers onto a lyrical journey, giving a voice to those one rarely gets to hear, and to loved ones now silent.” -from the Two Lines Press website
WTAW Press
Chimerica: A Novel by Anita Felicelli
296 pages – Small Press Distribution
“Down-and-out Tamil American trial lawyer Maya Ramesh fights to save a painted lemur come to life, and in settings that range from Oakland, California, to a Malagasy rain forest, becomes a champion for them both. In magical realist tradition Anita Felicelli’s satiric novel, Chimerica, looks at the inherent absurdities that drive systems of culture, power, and law. Fans of Marquez, Kelly Link, and Helen Oyeyemi will find Chimerica a spirited investigation of the ways in which art is codified and commodified—a contemporary philosophical, non-ideological, novel about art, originality, and American culture.” -from the Small Press Distrubution website
Like Water and Other Stories by Olga Zilberbourg
184 pages –Small Press Distribution
“With settings that range from the Cuban Missile Crisis and Soviet-era Perestroika to present-day San Francisco, Like Water and Other Stories, the first English-language collection from Leningrad-born author Olga Zilberbourg, looks at family and childrearing in ways both unsettling and tender, and characters who grapple with complicated legacies—of state, parentage, displacement, and identity. Like Water is a unique portrayal of motherhood, of immigration and adaptation, and an inside account of life in the Soviet Union and its dissolution. Zilberbourg’s stories investigate how motherhood reshapes the sense of self—and in ways that are often bewildering—against an uncharted landscape of American culture. In “Dandelion,” a child turns into a novel and is shipped off to an agent in New York. In “Doctor Sveta,” a young Soviet woman finds herself on a ship bound for Cuba at the onset of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In “Companionship,” a young boy decides to return to his mother’s uterus. Anthony Marra calls LIKE WATER “A book of succinct abundance, dazzling in its particulars, expansive in its scope,” and of these stories, Karen E. Bender says, they “cast a clear, illuminating light on topics ranging from motherhood, the workplace, birth, death, ambition, and immigration, all explored through exquisitely wrought characters in Russia and the United States. Olga Zilberbourg is a writer to read right now.” -from the Small Press Distribution website
